THERE is a fearsome song by Shellac called End Of Radio, which presents itself as the last piece of music on Earth. “This microphone turns sound into electricity,” sings frontman Steve Albini, if ‘singing’ is the right word for his vocal role as an imaginary disc jockey after some kind of apocalypse. “The last announcer plays the last record. The last watt leaves the transmitter and circles the globe in search of a listener. Is it really broadcasting if there is no-one there to receive?” Even when that track is performed for a live audience, as it probably will be at Shellac’s first-ever Glasgow show on November 2, it literally makes them sound like the ultimate rock band, playing only for themselves because nobody else is left alive to hear. And for all his modulated shouting – “Hey hey! This is a real goddamn emergency!” – Albini doesn’t sound like he minds.
Today, he confirms that this is basically accurate. “The band only exists to suit the three of us who are in it,” says Albini. “The only thing we’re concerned about is making it engaging for ourselves. We honestly don’t care what anyone else has to say about it. It’s not their band, it’s our band.”
This kind of gang mentality is expected of young rock stars, from whom it tends to come across as obligatory posturing, or adolescent solipsism. Albini is not young and has never really been a star, having spent his entire career underground, fronting a succession of highly respected yet often wilfully disreputable American punk acts – Big Black in the mid-1980s, then Rapeman for a couple of years, and latterly Shellac, who were formed, quite informally, in 1992.
“I had the luxury of being in those other bands while they were alive,” says Albini, “so I can tell you that Shellac is nothing like them. I don’t have a historical perspective on it. I can’t say which one is going to matter most to the rest of the world, but for me Shellac is the most important because it’s the active band right now. I think your current band has to mean more, because it still has the potential to move the ball.” All three members are old friends, and none of them have given up their day jobs. Drummer Todd Trainer is a barman at a Minneapolis pub called Nick and Eddie’s. Bassist Bob Weston and Albini himself are professional sound engineers. He has in fact taking this phone call on a break from work at Electrical Audio, the Chicago recording facility he founded in the early 1990s. He also lives on the premises. As a matter of policy, Albini does not discuss his commissions. “I totally understand your curiosity,” he says, when asked who he’s got in his studio today, “but I’m a little self-conscious talking about other people’s bands. I feel like it’s not my place to publicise the association between them and me, so I always try to be extra discreet. Not necessarily because there is anyone famous involved, just because it’s their business.”
Albini charges a flat daily fee for his services, and offers rock-bottom rates on room and equipment hire. He requests no royalties from sales of the 2000 or more records he has helped to make, and often refuses a printed credit in the liner notes. Most of those albums have never sold much anyway. Some of them – The Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, PJ Harvey’s Rid Of Me, and especially Nirvana’s In Utero – are much better known than any of Albini’s own output, if not qualitatively better than Big Black’s Atomizer or Shellac’s 1000 Hurts. He is a living legend of sorts, but not on the scale of Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, who chose him to engineer their first LP as a duo, Walking Into Clarksdale, or his childhood hero Iggy Pop, who he worked with on The Stooges’ recent comeback album, The Weirdness. Albini prefers to take the long view.
“I think the qualities which make music durable are not necessarily evident on the first listen,” he says. “If given enough breathing space, records that are not initially successful might find their natural audience, whether that is a big audience or a small one. I’ve seen so many examples of bands who were not popular, but their records were unique and remarkable, and survived to build a fanbase over time.” The Stooges are one such example. “They are a re-engergised band now, and touring the globe to packed houses, but their music is pretty much identical to what they were playing in 1969, at which time it was not successful. The world caught up to them by being continually exposed to that music on a low-key level. The music that I think of as ‘classic’ develops and sustains an audience on its merits, rather than external considerations.”
That particular band was one of the few that came up to Albini’s increasingly exacting standards as a teenager in Missoula, Montana. A little bit too big to qualify as a small town, and not entirely uncultured (John Updike called it “the Paris of the 1990s” in reference to its literary life) Missoula was apparently just boring enough to heighten the appeal of punk rock. The story goes that Albini first heard The Ramones on a school bus, and learned to play the bass while recovering from a broken leg. He moved across the American mid-west to study journalism in Evanston, Illinois, and started contributing to local magazines – or “zines”, as they are known by scenesters – with much the same balance of precision and aggression that he later brought to his lyrics and music.
All three members of Shellac share writing duties on their songs, but the word “sarcasm” has been a constant in reviews of every band Albini has been in. “Any band is going to develop it’s own internal vocabulary of black comedy,” he says. “But there are sardonic or sarcastic elements to everyday conversation, and I like the idea of embracing every aspect of normal life within music. From minute to minute on any given day you might be happy one moment and sad the next, laughing about something, then thinking aimlessly for a while, then longing for something. I don’t see any reason not to incorporate all that in our songs if we want to.” Even so, Albini is probably as renowned for his opinions as those songs, which seem to emanate from a single basic set of ethical and aesthetic principles. In 1993, during a notorious exchange of letters-to-the-editor printed in the Chicago Reader, he called the prominent critic Bill Wyman a “music press stooge”, and dismissed Wyman’s then-favoured artists from that city – Smashing Pumpkins, Urge Overkill and Liz Phair – as “three pandering sluts”.
Around the same time, he described the mighty Nirvana as “REM with a fuzzbox”, and did not mean it as a compliment. Perhaps inevitably, his subsequent working relationship with that band was intensely problematic. Albini’s part in the making of In Utero, which turned out to be their last studio album before Kurt Cobain’s suicide, is a well-documented chapter of the Nirvana story. He has since revised his judgement of their music, and does not agree that their story has become the bigger factor in why they are now so revered. “No, I think that’s nonsense. There are an awful lot of similar stories of bands that nobody gives a shit about. A lot of people kill themselves …
People who like Nirvana feel in some way the band is communicating something unique to them. I wasn’t their biggest fan when I started working on that record, but in the end I have to admit they were genuine about their music and their audience.” Cobain, for his part, had said he wanted to record with Albini because of his previous work with The Pixies and The Breeders. Notoriously torn between commercial success on a major record label and a fatally nostalgic aspiration to the joy and freedom of teenage garage bands, Cobain was also likely drawn to Albini’s unequivocal punk-rock integrity.
Unlike Nirvana, Big Black did not attract casual listeners, but a minority who took music seriously enough to share an almost Marxist contempt for the mainstream and its radio-friendly capital values. Albini’s first band is now remembered as manufacturing some of the loudest, purest noise that the world has ever heard. “The future belongs to analog [sic] loyalists,” they wrote on the sleeve of their second and last album, Songs About F***ing, in 1987. “F*** digital.”
Albini hasn’t changed his mind about that in the 20 years since, and today he stands almost alone in sound engineering by virtue of an absolute refusal to record music by means of computer technology. He can rationalise his preference for analogue equipment in purely practical and technical terms. “If I say I like to use old recording consoles, it’s not just because they’re old, it’s because they are exceptional. They’ve been working well for 40 years and they are still the best thing for the job.” But he also makes his methods sound inadvertently romantic:
“Before there were motorcycles, you had to use a horse to get around. But there are still situations where a horse is the best way. I feel the same is true of solving problems in the studio. A computer might be one way to make a record, but a tape machine might still be the better solution. That’s sort of how I see the world.” To hear Albini tell it, his job simply to provide fellow musicians with a permanent artefact – a perfect document of what they sounded like at a particular moment in time.
“It’s called recording because you’re making a historical record, and if your PC had ever crashed then you know how fragile and ephemeral digital storage can be. We don’t know how long analogue recordings will last, but 100 years is a good approximation. The earliest ones are still playable now.” Albini is talking shop here, and not about his own music, which he describes as “a beloved hobby”, as opposed to a “means of support”.
He says he doesn’t know or care how long Shellac albums might survive beyond the lifespan of the band and its three members, who write songs for fun and regard their upcoming UK performances as a holiday. Which is not to say Albini doesn’t still take it seriously.
“Shellac is a creative enterprise and a social enterprise. We don’t have any specific agenda. One song might be about a family pet, another might be about the odd sensation of feeling sympathetic towards a murderer. An awful lot of perspectives pop through your head every day, and I don’t see why our band shouldn’t be exploring that incredible richness of experience.” If life as we know it ended tomorrow, Shellac could probably keep recording, sealed inside Electrical Audio with an emergency generator and a stockpile of magnetic tape. And if somebody found those tapes 100 years from now, they would hear what powerful music was made, even when nobody was listening.
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